Boundless Prosperity

I can now reveal that for the past nine to 10 months, I've been working on a project to write a story on Ban Hin Lee Bank. 

The project is almost at an end now - for me, anyway - pending a final review of the draft by both my editor and my publisher. After all the final kinks are ironed out, the draft shall go for layout and then there will be another round of checking to ensure that the layout designer has done his job correctly. By this, I mean that the story is laid out correctly and the pictures are all in the right places. My publisher estimates that the middle of April would be about the time that the book can see print. I've got to keep my fingers crossed.

The book is divided into 10 chapters covering the bank's journey from 1935 till 2000. There are also five appendices including one in which I had attempted to reconstruct the names of the Ban Hin Lee Bank former employees. Not an easy task, especially for the period after 1995 because the intake of staff was no longer recorded in the bank newsletters.

This may sound strange but it is true. When Ban Hin Lee Bank was taken over by Southern Bank in 2000, and Southern Bank was in turn swallowed by CIMB Bank in 2006, many of the old Ban Hin Lee Bank records disappeared as if they were irrelevant and no longer important. But those were the gems of history. Once they were gone - disappeared, misplaced, destroyed, whatever - there was no way to trace them again.